Give me more wine, bloody
like the stain of Fosse on Pippin’s hands. Give me Ben Vereen,
sex made incarnate
singing of Charlemagne’s addiction to dopamine and
glory.
Bread/like security/a trigger in the
lizard brain/reward me/decadence trickling
from gaping mouths, the viscous juice of
supple fruit/dripping down chins/onto
breasts/hunger/licking/satiation
Give me Dionysus, God of madness, God of
ecstasy. Give me Dionysus, the frenzied
cult of souls, the ecstasy of worship.
Hedonism/hedonism/pleasure/glinting off
golden headdresses/communal rapture as the last high
and delirium, delirium
to avoid the sunrise.
Give me Zarathustra, the ubermensch, he who is
a seizure of power, the overcoming
of mediocrity. Give me a deity to
venerate, to kill.
Men and men and women and
/fucking/
limbs twining among limbs/byzantine paths of
thighs and tongues and
climbing/to climax/to clarity
Give me a Bacchanal, to
forget the Buddhist suffering in this world. Give me
a Bacchanal,
because I just want to feel.
And I can only feel/
when I feel to excess/
like the long-ago followers
of Bacchus, ascending to rapture
and praying for conception
on the dawn of equinox
at the birth of spring.
Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is the author of “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novella forthcoming with Emerge Literary Press. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Shannon was recently a finalist for the Ohio State University Press Journal Non/Fiction Prize. Follow her on her website at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks